


Broken Signal

by FireEye



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, Multi, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 21:55:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17252084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireEye/pseuds/FireEye
Summary: With the threat of the Reapers looming over the galaxy's collective heads, Shepard leads her team on a second expedition to Ilos.  Not that there's much to find, or that she even knows what she's looking for.





	Broken Signal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Settiai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Settiai/gifts).



“You know, Commander... _most people_ in this line of work would go on shore leave after saving the galaxy.”

Shepard paced the length of a crumbling wall, staring out into what was left of the dead city.  She paused, crossing her arms, and called back over her shoulder, “What’s stopping you?”

Kaidan pinched his tongue between his teeth.  He looked to Ashley for help, but she was staring at him with a smug _trying-not-to-laugh_ smirk that only made him snicker.  Shaking his head, he picked his way down an overgrown embankment where stairs might’ve once been.

Ashley landed in the dirt behind him.  Greenish-grey fronds grew over their heads, wobbling heavily on their thick stems as the pair pushed their way between them.  The wall rose up over the tallest plant by another five feet – it wasn’t difficult to imagine how different this place would have been fifty thousand years ago.

Except, Shepard didn’t have to imagine.

It was haunting her.

“Do you even know what you’re looking for?” Kaidan asked.

“I’ll know it when I find it.”

“How long’s that gonna take?”

Shepard heaved a sigh.  Her focus was on the ruins; she dully ignored the question.  He prodded her gently as he could.

“Sovereign’s gone, Shepard.”

“It took half the fleet along with it.”

“You can’t keep pushing yourself like this.”

“The Reapers are still out there, Alenko,” Shepard stated flatly.  “You know that as well as I do.”

“And the Alliance knows it, and the Council knows it,” Kaidan reminded her.  “What are you going to find here that a science team won’t?”

Shepard was evidently hearing him; what was impossible to know was whether she was _listening_.  She stood silent for a still few moments longer, then jumped down, trudging back through the overgrown plaza.

“These things take _time_.”  Kaidan persisted.  But he knew he was losing ground, metaphorically as well as literally.  “We don’t even know if they’re gonna show up in our lifetimes.”

“The science team?” Ashley wondered idly, as Shepard left them behind again.  “Or the Reapers?”

Kaidan huffed, and she gave him a well-meaning slap to the shoulder.  He didn’t return her wry smile.

“Off the record...” she suggested, voice low, “I say we hit her over the head with something big and heavy and drag her back to the landing zone.  And pin it on the geth.”

Kaidan stared at her.  It took him a moment before he scoffed.

“Remember what went down on Pinnacle Station?  She’d kill us both.”

The overgrowth had already covered Shepard’s path.  Hesitant to follow, Kaidan started off.  Not after her, but towards the Mako.

 

Night was slowly falling over Ilos.  It would be several hours yet before the lingering sunlight was fully faded from the sky, but there was already a distant glow of wildfire on the horizon.  Even now the gloom was slithering in.

This place was creepy as hell.

***

Ashley sat next to him on the starboard bench.  It wasn’t any closer than Alliance Marines were accustomed to when forced to share close quarters on a planetside expedition; yet, it still was a little close for comfort.  But... if Shepard didn’t know by now, well...

Shepard knew.  She had to.  _Everyone_ knew, except Alliance Command.

Which was how these things usually went.

Kaidan tried to take solace in the fact that she was here now, beside him; if they were separated at some point in the future, they’d face that order when it came down.

Not that Shepard was paying them much mind.  She sprawled in one of the padded cockpit chairs, chewing on her thumbnail, staring up into space.  Insofar as _space_ was the Mako’s display bank.

The next time he happened to look her way, he found her staring at him.  She blinked, slowly; then, abruptly, she rolled out of the navigator’s chair.  Her boots hit the floor with a metallic _clang_ , and she climbed out past them.

Ashley lifted her head as Shepard disappeared out the hatch, and waved off the vid she’d been engrossed in, for all that she had it saved and had watched it several times since landing.

Wrestling with indecision, Kaidan tensed to rise after her.  Ashley caught his hand, and held it for a few seconds longer than strictly necessary.

The rustle of foliage grew distant.

“You know, with everything that’s gone down, she’d be first in line for a promotion if she wasn’t acting stupid crazy.”

“I don’t think _promotion_ has ever been the first thing on her mind.”  It was one of the things Kaidan admired about Shepard – her service wasn’t about climbing rank, or prestige.

Her methods could certainly be unorthodox, but she was driven – deep down, _driven_ – by doing the right thing.  Whatever the cost to her personally.

“Was she always like this?”

“I’ve known her all of forty-eight hours longer than you have,” Kaidan admitted.  “And the first time I saw her, she was pulling a commando stunt to board the Normandy unauthorized, because the shipboard VI had a few bugs in it and didn’t recognize her on the manifest.”  He let that sink in.  “So yes, if I had to give an opinion, I’d say she was always like this.”

“Huh.”

Ashley licked her lip.  Her mouth curled into one of those teasing smiles.

“She likes you, you know?”

“She _likes_ you,” Kaidan clarified, “She _tolerates_ me.”

“Nah, I think it’s more like...”  Her smile faded a bit, and her fingers bumped against his hand where it rested on the bench.  “Biotics intimidate her.  In case you haven’t noticed.”

He had.  It was hard not to.

“Every time we’ve encountered one who _wasn’t_ you, she gets all weird about it.  Gotta wonder how desperate she was to let Liara into her head, never mind that other asari.”  Her focus wavered, then snapped back to the present, and her smile returned full force.  “But... underneath all that.  She likes you.”

Kaidan sighed, and rubbed his eyes.  He knew what Ashley was talking about, or he thought he did.  He’d seen the way Shepard reacted around other biotics, and by comparison she always gave him the benefit of the doubt.  She was cautious around him, but then she was cautious around _everyone_ except Captain Anderson.  And maybe, more recently, Ashley.

The latter leaned into him; the wide-eyed innocent look would have been more believable if it weren’t for the mischief shadowing her expression.

“Think she’d kill me if I borrowed her deck of cards?”

“Yes.”

***

Somewhere on the planet, it was dawn.  Their side of the planet was still locked in the middle of the long night.

Six hours sleep and Shepard had preempted him by up and vanishing without them.  But then, it wasn’t the first time she’d made the whole Spectre appointment seem not only natural, but overly literal.

Once on the ground outside of the Mako, Kaidan stretched.  A lonesome wind sighed through the ghost city, rustling leaves and whispering between the artificial and eroded gaps in stone.

Far above it all, beyond the skyscrapers that reached dark into the night, the stars were distant – so far away, they might have been another lifetime.  The Normandy was barely visible in orbit: only because it was brighter than the rest, and he knew where to look.

His wandering took him a short distance away from the camp, away from the wall of the nearest building and further out into the open, where he paused to check his bearings.

One of the eerie Prothean statues peered down at him out of the darkness.

Shepard was nowhere in sight.

Kaidan could have feigned surprise, but no one was around to appreciate it.  He raised his hand to his ear, activating his comm. implant.  “Shepard?”

A twinge of doubt wormed its way into the back of his mind.  The comm. wasn’t merely silent; to his ear, it was unnaturally dead.  But he could easily have been imagining things.

“...Williams?”

Swallowing his misgivings, Kaidan pulled up his omni-tool.  Its glow hardly penetrated the gloom surrounding him, and he killed it just as quickly.

 

Ashley lifted her head from the bench as he clambered past her into the navigator’s chair and powered on the display.  It took her all of ten seconds to put her hair up, and she loomed blearily over his shoulder.

“...what’s going on?”

“I can’t reach Shepard; comms are down,” Kaidan explained.  The set of his mouth turned grim.  “So are nav sensors.  Our systems are being jammed.”

Ashley unclipped her helmet.

Shepard’s was, predictably, abandoned under the bench.

“Hostiles?”

“Nobody knows we’re here except the brass and the Council,” Kaidan reasoned out loud.  “And nobody else knows how to get here.”

“Nobody who got here would have reason to jam us.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.  Ashley gave him space as he climbed out of the cockpit.  “Get the Mako back to the landing zone and radio the Normandy.”

“What?”

“If I can find Shepard, we’ll rendezvous there.”

“Whoa, whoa – _wait_ -...”

Her fingers were on his lips before he could say anything else.  They lingered for emphasis.

“Putting aside for a moment... y’know... _everything else_ ,” Ashley waved her hand in front of his face, “Do you know how much Hell I’d catch for going back to the Alliance without two of their most important not to mention decorated field officers?”

The look on his face might have given away that he hadn’t.

“This isn’t about you-...”

She unclipped his helmet, and shoved it into his hands.

“You’re right.  It’s not.  _I’m_ expendable.  Always have been.”

Kaidan flinched.

“Not to me.”

Ashley rolled her eyes, but she was smirking dangerously.  That about summed it up, didn’t it?

“Cram the sweet talk, LT,” she purred.  “Focus on your job; let me focus on mine.”

***

Finding one person in the ancient, dilapidated ruin of a city on the dark side of the planet wasn’t going to be easy.

It took Kaidan longer than it ought to have to jury-rig a mod that gave them scrambled-but-serviceable navigation and would allow him to backtrace the jamming signal.  It didn’t give them much to go on, but checking out the anomaly was better than scouring the city quadrant by quadrant for a woman that might very well have been a moving target.

Especially since no amount of tweaking was picking up Shepard’s combat computer.

 

The trace took them into a building half-buried beneath centuries of silt.  The labyrinthine network of rooms and corridors were accented by thick vines and the deep roots of nature encroaching to reclaim them.  Occasionally, the thick overgrowth or collapsed dirt and rubble forced them to double back.  In some places, gaps in the ceiling reached all the way to the sky.

In the heart of the structure, they reached what seemed to be a flickering terminal, casting uneasy shadows across the room.

Kaidan froze.

The fern-like plants surrounding them had been trampled.  Recently.  And the root he was stepping over had three distorted, elongated fingers.  Ashley hadn’t seen it at first as she secured the room, but his single-minded concentration got her attention as he reached down to one of the fronds by his knee.

It wasn’t synthetic plasma.

His fingers came away dark red.

Coming to stand by him as Kaidan stared at the blood on his hands, Ashley blinked at him, then at the broken geth stalker on the ground.  Then she huffed a sigh.

“Great.”

Kaidan swallowed.  Rubbing his fingers together, he cast about at the dimly lit room.  There was a trail here, leading off into one of the adjoining paths.

He pulled up his omni-tool as darkness once again enshrouded them.  It was a risk, but a cobbled together half-warning was better than no warning, and a sparse blood trail was a better lead than nothing.

Even if, now knowing otherwise, Kaidan might’ve preferred _nothing_.

 

The next wide open space they came to, Ashley grabbed his arm and shoved him behind the rubble that had piled up on one side of the room.  He have to ask; he recognized it in the same instant she did.

The geth headlamp shone their way briefly, before returning to its task.  Whatever that task was, it seemed to involve mulling about.  Kaidan counted half a dozen others.

For unsympathetic killing machines, their body language almost seemed... _uneasy_.

Kaidan pulled up his omni-tool.  His computers sensors were still scrambled, but some of the signal was getting through.  His mouth pulled into a frown at the readout that scrolled across his faceplate.

“I’ve got her,” Kaidan informed Ashley under his breath.  “Her vitals are in flux, but she’s alive.”  Shepard had taken a hit to the head and a hit to the chest – the second had damaged her hardsuit’s medi-gel delivery system, making a remote application impossible.  Which meant getting to her and applying medi-gel by hand.  “We need to get her out.”

Beside him, Ashley clenched her teeth together beneath her faceplate.  “How many geth?”

“Too many.  But less than ten, I think.”

Ashley’s fingers flexed around the grip of her assault rifle.

“I’ll give you a window, you get to Shepard.”  Noting his expression, she added, “Unless you have a better plan?”

Kaidan didn’t like it, but Shepard was priority.

His fingers moved over long-ingrained commands as he programmed a disc.  It’d give Ashley a two minute head start, if the geth took the bait.

Kaidan stuck the tech-grenade on the wall.  Trap set, he pulled up a barrier, then directed his focus outward; he cast a wide net, throwing the geth in as chaotic an arc as he could.

Ashley opened fire.  It drew the geth’s attention before they had even recovered, and they stormed after her when she ran.  He waited until they were clustered in the bottleneck of the passage before detonating their weapons to overload.

After that, it was all on her.

 

One more turn in the labyrinth, and he stumbled over more broken geth.  Two more turns, and he reached a dead end.  Shepard had her back to the wall, a grenade in one hand and her Kessler in the other.  Her eyes were on the garbled Prothean display loomed over her, playing a message on repeat.

Or they were, until he came around the corner.

Kaidan couldn’t understand a word of it.  But he tried to appreciate the hollow ghost of a long-dead civilization that gave him light to work with.

Surprise flickered across Shepard’s face; faint but self-evident.  But she didn’t shoot him; her fingers closed over the grenade as he got closer, and she struggled to sit up.  A plasma burn cut across her forehead; the same shot had singed her hair.  The lower inside curve of her armor below the chestplate had melted where her shields had failed, and blood was oozing from the wound to fuse with the mess of ceramic and fabric.

Shepard stared at him; there was a challenge there, dark and dangerous.  Kaidan preoccupied himself with mitigating the damage.  When he glanced up at her, he found her gaze had dropped to his hands; there was something in her expression he couldn’t quite read, soft and fragile and out of place.

“Come on.”  Finishing the patch job, he hooked an arm around her to help her stand.  She fell into him, and he ended up supporting her weight, guiding her hand to stow her weapon.  “Let’s get you out of here.”

Shepard immediately dug her heels in, struggling against him.

“Wait.”

Her head lolled towards the broken hologram.  For the first time, Kaidan took note of the pitch and cadence of the language.  When he looked back to her face, he realized what it was.

“It’s a distress call, isn’t it?”

Shepard faintly nodded.  It was the smallest gesture, but she swayed in his grip.

“They’re gone, Shepard.  It’s been fifty thousand years; there’s nothing left to save.”

“Pull the data core... _thing_.  I want to keep it.”

“Shepard-...”

“I want it anyway.”

She was suffering blood loss, a concussion, and whatever the hell else that message was drudging up in her head.  And, Kaidan found, he couldn’t look away from whatever it was that was lurking behind her eyes.

“Please...”

Sighing, Kaidan set her back down.  Gently.

***

Ashley fell in with them halfway to the exit.

“The geth?”

“Scrap, sir,” Ashley reported.  Kaidan grimaced at the formality, but knew where it was coming from.  “But to be blunt,” and to be _fair_ , he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, “we don’t know if there’s one squad or fifty.  This place is big enough they could be crawling anywhere.”  Now that she’d duly informed him, it was his turn.  “Orders?”

She was asking him, not Shepard. 

“Time to regroup, I think.”

Shepard scowled, but stayed out of it.

 

It was a long trek back.  The Mako was as they left it, but whatever was jamming them was still out there, which, as far as Kaidan was concerned, settled it.

“Get us clear,” he told Ashley.

On his own end, he worked on making sure Shepard was secure, and reassessing her injuries.

Shepard’s helmet rolled out from under the bench, and struck his foot.  Kaidan reached down to catch it before it could roll further, and pointedly shoved it into her hands.

“You forgot something.”

For the moment, he felt he could afford to be sarcastic.

Shepard let the helmet drop.  Inertia rolled it towards the back.

***

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothin’,” Ashley drawled, biting back an amused smile.  “Watching the two of you go at it is the highlight of any day.”

It started as concern.  It developed into an argument.  Now they were right back where they started, and he forgot how they even got here.

All Kaidan knew for sure was that Shepard could be obstinate as hell.

Gritting his teeth, he focused on her.  On the matter at hand.  Shepard curled one hand over the other in her lap, flexing her fingers.

She looked...

... _lost_.

Sighing, Kaidan eased down next to her.  He reached to cover her hands with one of his, and she stilled.  Taking a chance, he reached to touch her cheek, tilting her face towards him.

“You can’t save the galaxy all by yourself, Shepard.”

She swallowed.  Her eyes flicked towards his fingers where they lingered.

“Hey, if you’re gonna kiss her, you better do it soon, ‘cause you’re not gonna get another shot like this until the next semi-mythical Prothean ghost planet Shepard deploys us on,” Ashley cut in.  “And only then if it’s a prolonged drop.”

Kaidan snapped his head towards the cockpit, choking on his words he didn’t have.  He looked back to Shepard to find her eyeing him quizzically, eyebrows knit together in confusion.

And...

...well...

Sure, they’d been dancing around each other for a while at the start, but...

...the way everything fell together...

“Kaidan...?”

Shepard’s voice was soft; a question spoken only in tone.  Her eyes were the most vivid blue he could ever remember having seen.  They drifted shut as he leaned in close, drawn by a force of magnetism he’d never even begun to fathom.

 _“Am I...”_ a disembodied voice ventured over their comm. _“...interrupting something?”_

Shepard’s eyes snapped open, and Kaidan jolted back.

Ashley gave them both a mock-exasperated look.

“Told you so,” she chirped.

Shepard straightened, clearing her throat.  She blinked at Kaidan.

“Talk.”

“Later,” he agreed.

He reached out.  Hesitated.  Then reached for her hand again, to squeeze her fingers.  Shepard rarely ever smiled, but she did look...

...well...

...a little less alone in the universe.

**Author's Note:**

> -This started as a slightly different idea, then it morphed a bit, as ideas do.  
> -I would have liked to have played up the relationship angle a bit more, but the stuff happening bits got in the way. Oops.  
> -Shepard is a bit broken but they love her anyway.  
> -[Fuck Virmire.](http://twistedsinews.tumblr.com/post/17749387890)


End file.
